None of it made sense.
Her trips to the bathroom gave her some idea of the time. It was afternoon. Probably around three or four o’clock, but perhaps later. Down in the basement it’s all the same. In this dark place on this concrete floor where the cold seeps slowly and forcefully into her body it’s easy to imagine that it’s permanent midnight. Her wrists are sore. He replaced the gag she had in her mouth with duct tape, and at the same time he gave her the bathroom breaks, he also gave her water to drink. She doesn’t struggle against the ropes anymore. In fact she hardly even moves her hands or wrists. The skin there is just too raw. There are moments where she thinks about how easy it would be to give up. To accept her fate might just mean dying won’t be so difficult. These moments are brief. She would never give up. Never make it easy for Cyris. Somehow, she’s going to get out of this. She will see her family again. Her friends. And Charlie?
She doesn’t know. Things can never be the same between them, but what exactly does that mean? She can’t forgive him for what he did to her on Monday night. Can she? No. No, of course not. However, the fact she’s questioning just how much she can forgive tells her something important-she’s not over him. And he’s not over her either. He still has photographs of her on the walls and he’s still wearing his wedding ring.
She hears the basement door starting to open before she sees it. She looks up as light spills into the room, then has to close her eyes and look away as the light hurts her. Cyris has reached her by the time she can see anything without having to squint. The scent of soap and sweat overpowers her as he leans down, and a moment later a knife touches the ropes that bind her. He tells her to stand, but her legs give way and she falls on her side. He hisses the command at her again, this time adding the sight of his knife as an incentive. It works, and when she gets to her feet he tosses something at her that she can’t identify until they hit the ground. Handcuffs. Maybe he has a whole drawer full of them.
When he tells her to pick them up she doesn’t refuse. The refusal begins when he tells her to put them on. Handcuffed she will be no match for him. He takes a step toward her and she watches his face as anger and insanity blossom behind his eyes, and she realizes that handcuffed or not she’s in the same situation, and that if she pushes the point he’ll get those cuffs snapped onto her wrists anyway and beat the hell out of her in the process. The cold metal ratchets into place as she cuffs her hands in front of her.
He leads her up the stairs into the hallway. She can hear the cartoons again, and in the distance a neighbor is mowing lawns, and somewhere between those two noises a chorus of barking from several dogs. The curtains are drawn, but around the edges she can see the dull fading of sunlight. It has to be around six thirty, maybe seven o’clock, she thinks.
He leads her through to the adjoining garage, which looks clinical white under the glow of eight fluorescent tubes. Brand-new tools are hanging neatly on a Peg-Board. Some look new, some look well used. There’s a wheelchair lying on its side jammed under the workbench. Did he kill somebody who couldn’t walk? Is the wheelchair a souvenir? On the bench is a pile of metal shavings and an open box of shotgun shells, next to them a hacksaw.
“Take off the tape,” he tells her.
She reaches up and pulls it away. It hurts. “Please,” she says, “please let me go.”
He lifts up his hand and points his palm at her. She stops talking.
“If you say anything, I’ll hurt you,” he says.
“Who does the wheelchair belong to?”
He steps in and uses the back of his hand to strike her. The impact knocks her onto the ground. She looks up at him.
“Get up,” he tells her.
She gets up.
“Talk again and it will be worse. You understand?”
She nods.
“Now get in the car.”
There are two cars in the garage. One is Charlie’s. The other is a dark blue four-door sedan. He opens the passenger door of the sedan for her. She climbs in. As he moves around to the driver’s side she contemplates locking the doors, but with all those tools to choose from, it’d only be a matter of seconds before he forced his way in. He climbs in, immediately telling her to shut up again even though she hasn’t said a word. He tells her to be still while they wait for the darkness to arrive. She slowly nods. They wait silently in the car as it gets darker outside.
She’s more scared now than she’s ever been.
Scared of the dark.
Scared of Cyris.
Scared of Charlie.
She says nothing as she waits beneath the glare of the fluorescent lights.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The problem with sleep is you never quite know whether the nightmares are real. Bad things are happening. People are dying and I’m the reason, and I can’t seem to wake myself. The sad part is that this is no dream.
I sit up and stare at my bedroom wall where a few slivers of sun rise slowly toward the ceiling. I try to shake the tiredness off, but it begs me to stay. My sunglasses have fallen off and are resting on the floor. I use my T-shirt to wipe away sweat that’s layered across my body. I glance at my buzzing alarm clock and the red numbers say it’s time to go to work.
The tiredness fades as I dress in my fatigue gear, but the nightmare remains. I put on my vest and load up the pockets. A quick scan in the mirror to make sure everything looks okay tells me nothing is okay. If I show up dressed as G.I. Joe he’s going to know something’s up. Getting the fatigues is turning out to have been a dumb idea. I strip back down and dress more casually. The night is warm, but I put on a jacket to conceal my gun, and anyway, it’ll be cold up on the pier. I tuck the Swiss Army knife into my jacket pocket. I drag the money from the ceiling and rest it on the living room table.
Our meeting is over two hours away so I get something to eat. I grab a packet of instant pasta from the cupboard. Just add water and a microwave and eight minutes of my time, which I use up unloading and then reloading the gun over and over just to make sure the bullets are still in there. I dish out the pasta and sit down at the table in the silence of my house and slowly eat it, thinking of dead men walking toward gas chambers after their last meal. Maybe I should have cooked something better. A roast dinner, or I could have ordered pizza or Chinese. The pasta tastes okay, but I think with my current appetite even a gourmet meal would taste bland. I dump the dishes in the sink and I’m about to wash them when I realize it’s pointless. I could be dead by tomorrow. The confidence I had at the beginning of the day when I arranged to have my back door fixed has gone the way of the dinosaur.
When there is an hour to go, I grab the gun and slip it inside my jacket, sliding the magazine in next to it. I take a handful of extra bullets and drop them into a different pocket. They click against each other as I walk. I probably won’t need the extras. If I can’t kill him with the first seventeen shots there won’t be much hope of killing him with the following seventeen. I grab the rest of my gear, which consists of the binoculars I bought yesterday and now also a flashlight, some rope, and Landry’s handcuffs. I hold the handcuffs and stare at them for a few seconds, putting them into context, the context being I was wearing these when I thought I was going to die. I picture Detective Inspector Bill Landry’s corpse turning gray in the river. He’s probably turning a color I don’t ever want to see. Something between white and purple. His eyes are open and milky white as the sun beats down on him. His skin will be slipping off, his body bloating, the insects will be. .
I can feel my pasta starting to move in my stomach.
Time to move.
I load the money into a dark blue canvas bag, which I put into the back of the car. I leave for New Brighton a little earlier than I needed to, so I drive a little slower. The sky is clouding over and I can’t see any stars, can’t see the moon. I park right opposite the pier. I watch my watch for a while. Then I grab the canvas bag and the rest of my gear, and head back up the sandy steps. The day has gotten colder than I thought it would. The wind is stronger. It feels like there’s a storm coming.